Brand New Day by Joshua Radin

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A re-post from this article and my comment below.

Although we like to think that the people in our lives are well-adjusted, happy, healthy minded individuals, we sometimes realize that it just isn’t so.  Personally, I’ve had moments where I’ll be skipping through my day, happy as can be, thinking life is grand and BAM, I’ll be blindsided by someone who manages to knock the happy wind out of my sails.  Sometimes it is easy to write it off and other times, not so much.

Maybe you are a positive person, but when you are around a certain individual, you feel negative.  Or, maybe you have an idealistic view of the world and when you are with certain people, you are made to feel silly, unrealistic or delusional.  Or, maybe you pride yourself in being completely independent and in control of your life, but when you are around a certain family member, you regress into a state of childhood.

Some of these situations, and yes, these people, can have a tremendously negative impact on our lives.  And, although we are all human and have our ‘issues,’ some ‘issues’ are quite frankly, toxic.  They are toxic to our happiness.  They are toxic to our mental outlook.  They are toxic to our self-esteem.  And they are toxic to our lives.  They can suck the life out of us and even shorten our lifespan.

Here are the worst of the toxic personalities out there and how to spot them:

1. Manipulative Mary: These individuals are experts at manipulation tactics.  Is a matter of fact, you may not even realize you have been manipulated until it is too late.  These individuals figure out what your ‘buttons’ are, and push them to get what they want.

Why they are toxic: These people have a way of eating away at your belief system and self-esteem.  They find ways to make you do things that you don’t necessarily want to do and before you know it, you lose your sense of identity, your personal priorities and your ability to see the reality of the situation.  The world all of a sudden becomes centered around their needs and their priorities.

2. Narcissistic Nancy: These people have an extreme sense of self-importance and believe that the world revolves around them.  They are often not as sly as the Manipulative Marys of the world, but instead, tend to be a bit overt about getting their needs met.  You often want to say to them “It isn’t always about you.”

Why they are toxic: They are solely focused on their needs, leaving your needs in the dust.  You are left disappointed and unfulfilled.  Further, they zap your energy by getting you to focus so much on them, that you have nothing left for yourself.

3. Debbie Downers: These people can’t appreciate the positive in life.  If you tell them that it is a beautiful day, they will tell you about the impending dreary forecast.  If you tell them you aced a mid-term, they’ll tell you about how difficult the final is going to be.

Why they are toxic: They take the joy out of everything.  Your rosy outlook on life continues to get squashed with negativity.  Before you know it, their negativity consumes you and you start looking at things with gray colored glasses yourself.

4. Judgmental Jims: When you see things as cute and quirky, they see things as strange and unattractive.  If you find people’s unique perspectives refreshing, they find them ‘wrong’.  If you like someone’s eclectic taste, they find it ‘disturbing’ or ‘bad’.

Why they are toxic: Judgmental people are much like Debbie Downers.  In a world where freedom rings, judgment is sooo over.  If the world was a homogeneous place, life would be pretty boring.  Spending a lot of time with these types can inadvertently convert you into a judgmental person as well.

5. Dream Killing Keiths: Every time you have an idea, these people tell you why you can’t do it.  As you achieve, they try to pull you down.  As you dream, they are the first to tell you it is impossible.

Why they are toxic: These people are stuck in what is instead of what could be.  Further, these individuals eat away at your self-esteem and your belief in yourself.  Progress and change can only occur from doing new things and innovating, dreaming the impossible and reaching for the stars.

6. Insincere Illissas: You never quite feel that these people are being sincere.  You tell a funny story, they give you a polite laugh.  You feel depressed and sad and they give you a ‘there, there’ type response.  You tell them you are excited about something and you get a very ho-hum response.

Why they are toxic: People who aren’t sincere or genuine build relationships on superficial criteria.  This breeds shallow, meaningless relationships.  When you are really in need of a friend, they won’t be there.  When you really need constructive criticism, they would rather tell you that you are great the way you are.  When you need support, they would rather see you fail or make a fool of yourself.

7. Disrespectful Dannys: These people will say or do things at the most inappropriate times and in the most inappropriate ways.  In essence, they are more subtle, grown up bullies.  Maybe this person is a friend who you confided in and uses your secret against you.  Maybe it is a family member who puts their busy-body nose into your affairs when it is none of their business.  Or maybe, it is a colleague who says demeaning things to you.

Why they are toxic: These people have no sense of boundaries and don’t respect your feelings or, for that matter, your privacy.  These people will cause you to feel frustrated and disrespected.

8. Never Enough Nellies: You can never give enough to these people to make them happy.  They take you for granted and have unrealistic expectations of you.  They find ways to continually fault you and never take responsibility for anything themselves.

Why they are toxic: You will spend so much time trying to please them, that you will end up losing yourself in the process.  They will require all of your time and energy, leaving you worn out and your own needs sacrificed.

My comment: Toxic is negative. It’s good to spot these types of personalities though it describes everyone being toxic at some point and we can’t avoid it at times.  We  all qualify as being toxic. The reason why people may avoid or dislike you depends on how extreme you are. We can always counter our toxicity by having a positive mind set.

Watch this video and see drunken ewoks attack! hick!

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Wordpress Post Slugs and Permalinks by benz

A Post Slug is a permalink. Permalink stands for permanent link which points directly to a URL of a particular post. And we want the link of that particular post to be logical and easily track back. Example, if my post title is about ‘global warming issue‘. The default permalink will be ‘http://blog.theknuts.com/?p=123‘ and that cannot be easily identify. But we can define the post slug into ‘http://blog.theknuts.com/global-warming-issue‘, which can be easily understood. Wordpress will automatically truncate the link title white spaces with (-) hyphen.

Wordpress self-hosted has options for defining slugs which is not available for wordpress.com. You can find them under Posts: Post tags and Categories, and under Links: Link Categories. You can also define Permalinks under Settings options. Setting >> Permalinks

Under common settings, I select the month and name of the post. That will depend on your preference. Hmm… I think in wordpress.com the automatic or default settings now for permalinks is with the month and name of post.

The Tree. GE ecomagination.

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Five men from a remote Tropical Island, Tanna, in the middle of South pacific were chosen to leave their island to visit UK. To observe and document the Bristish way of life and think about the way we live our lives in modern society. ‘Meet the Natives’.

from left: Tuil (finest doctor), Albi (greatest dancer), Chief Yappa (greatest Chief), Hozen (finest farmer), Timmitose (narrator/english translator)

*not sure of the spelling of their names, this is just based from what I’ve heard. (correct me if I’m wrong)

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I’ve been following these guys since first aired in Natgeo channel last October. It is so much fun and learning to watch this documentary. What to expect from these guys? Which they find modern people weird, haha. You can see the full documentary in youtube VanuatuVeritas channel. Thanks for sharing! These native people are true human who truly value respect, care and love to their fellowmen the thing that modern people are blinded by the fast phase of growing technology which happiness is being controlled with selfishness. I would rather call them the ‘genuine people‘.

Buckets of Rain. Love these videos from GE ecomagination commercials.

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I’m finding my way with wp themes to do some workaround and create my own  until I found some code embedded on some wp theme php script like this

"eval(base64_decode('Pz4gCQk...')"

I’m quite curious and suspicous about the code so I tried to look for any info in the net. And it’s just what I thought about…I learned that this is an encrypted code that can be found on many wp themes. The codes are embedded can do some redirecting on another sites to increase their traffic or maybe in worsed case it  will let hackers go into your databases. Good thing the one I decode only shows a  link going to a site . hmm…

I found this site helpful for decoding.

Wordpress self-hosted  quick guide by benz

1. Download the latest copy of WP (here) and EXTRACT!

2. CREATE your DataBase. Hostings have different user interface or the control panel. In setting up your Database take note of your database name, database user name and password and the mysql host name.

3. Open the WP folder you just downloaded. Find the ‘wp-config-sample.php‘ inside wordpress folder and re-name it to ‘wp-config.php‘.

4. Open the file ‘wp-config.php’ to a text editor (except word) and provide the following info.

DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE. Just leave them as it is!

5. Authenticate unique keys for security reasons. SCROLL down a little bit on the page (same file). And you can see this piece of code.

You can see commented (/* */) instructions on what to modify. You need to generate a unique key by going to this site ‘https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/‘. COPY THE CODE GENERATED and OVERWRITE it to the code shown above (the text with blue and red color) .

SAVE the files!

6. UPLOAD the wp files to your own directory(folder)  into your SERVER by ftp.

7. Once upload complete, install WP by going to yourblogURL/wp-admin/install.php. (ex. http://blog.theknuts.com/wp-admin/install.php). If no error, you can see WP welcome page. Provide your BLOG TITLE , E-MAIL add and the checkbox ‘Allow my blog to appear…‘ (it is check by default). And click “Install Wordpress“.

8. Installation SUCCESSFUL! Wordpress will provide you a default username and password which can be change later on in your admin settings.

WELCOME TO WORDPRESS!!!

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Though my hosting supports one-click wp install, I decided to do it manually. Yes, I’m new to wp and still finding my way with it. The first time I got this error,

“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in /home/.wysiwyg/theknuts/blog.theknuts.com/wp-admin/includes/template.php on line 2033″

Yeah right, welcome me wordpress. Template.php probably has some issues. I tried to google for possible answers, parse error  is very common in wp I think, but can’t find an exact scenario. I might have made some mistakes during my first installation, so will try to install it the second time, but to my local server first for testing . I downloaded the tar file version of wp instead of the zip version which I used during my first installaltion. After going through the same process again. It worked!  hmm..